Refers to efforts to delegitimise violent extremist ideologies, and to deter recruitment into specific terrorist groups or campaigns. It involves targeted efforts to reduce the access to citizens by influential individuals and groups whose deliberate mission is to expand support for terrorism.

Refers to concerted efforts directed at radicalised individuals to cause them to change their views to reject violent extremist ideologies and to seek to act within Kenya’s legal and constitutional bounds. It is often aimed at prisoners convicted of terrorist or violent extremist crimes,or voluntary returnees from active participation in terrorist groups.

Refers to individuals deserting, defecting or demobilising from terrorist groups and activities. This is a behavioural or declarative act and does not necessarily include the psychological and social dimensions of de-radicalisation.

It is a gradual or phased process that employs the ideological conditioning of individuals and groups to socialise them into violent extremism, and recruitment into terrorist groups or campaigns. It is dependant on a fanatical ideology that rejects dialogue and compromise in favour of a ends-justifies-ends approach, particularly in the willingness to utilise mass violence to advance political aims — defined in racial, ethnic, sectarian and religious terms — opposed to the democratic principles enshrined in Kenya’s Constitution.

It is a process that aims to ensure that disengaged and de-radicalised violent extremists and terrorists, particularly returnees from Al Shabaab and like groups, are given the counselling, critical reasoning tools, and knowledge to shift their mind-sets and enable them to be peaceful and law-abiding citizens.

Refers to actions that support the social, ideological, psychological, and economic wellbeing of rehabilitated individuals as they return to live with their families and communities, and that ensure that they remain peaceful and law-abiding in the long run.

Refers to the process whereby an individual becomes a violent extremist without any specific terrorist group engaging him directly; it often occurs through access to extremist propaganda via media and the Internet.

According to the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2012 (POTA), a “terrorist act” means an act or threat of action — (a) which — (i) involves the use of violence against a person; (ii) endangers the life of a person, other than the person committing the action; (iii) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public; (iv) results in serious damage to property; (v) involves the use of firearms or explosives; (vi) involves the release of any dangerous, hazardous, toxic or radioactive substance or microbial or other biological agent or toxin into the environment; (vii) interferes with an electronic system resulting in the disruption of the provision of communication, financial, transport or other essential services; (viii) interferes or disrupts the provision of essential or emergency services; (ix) prejudices national security or public safety; and

(b) which is carried out with the aim of — (i) intimidating or causing fear amongst members of the public or a section of the public; or (ii) intimidating or compelling the Government or international organisation to do, or refrain from any act; or (iii) destabilising the religious, political,constitutional, economic or social institutions of a country, or an international organization.

Typically structured as revolutionary vanguard organisations whose employ of violence is intended to broaden their ideological appeal to a larger religious/racial/ethnic/social grouping. They utilise violence without legal or moral restraints and use front groups and a disguised command-and-control hierarchy for propaganda, ideological indoctrination, and mass mobilisation.